Digital nomads are frequently typecast as tech-savvy Millennials remotely working via an Internet connection while living as an expatriate.

However, they come in all shapes and sizes.

The charming Baltic country of Estonia is offering a visa targeted at digital nomads and other countries will likely copy this progressive type of visa.

Estonia’s revolutionary visa allows digital nomads to work in Estonia all year round.

This visa also includes 90 days of travel in the Schengen Zone of mainland Europe.

This visa isn't targeted at EU citizens who already reap the benefits of freedom of movement within the EU.

Estonia is on a mission to stockpile innovative minds in a country that prides itself as a start-up hub.

More importantly, jacking up the volume of tech workers is becoming an existential issue for many sovereign countries as developed countries reap the monetary rewards from such new cutting-edge technology.

The Baltic nation of Estonia was an architect of tech innovation in the past, rolling out Skype before Facebook and Twitter existed.

Skype was entirely comprised of local Estonian developers who achieved this in the early 2000s.

Quite a feat for such a small population.

These digital nomads create communities that harness an enormous flow of tech know-how.

Tallinn, Estonia has erupted into a top 10 digital stronghold attracting hordes of digital nomads.

If technical issues arise, help is on the way!

The message is that simple.

Estonia does not care if you drink kombucha lattes or if you eat green tea ice cream.

Their main concern is if you know how to use a computer well or not - plain and simple.

The global tech talent shortage is a leading issue in many megacities, and this is just the beginning of a world led by digital nomads.

Try hiring an experienced artificial intelligence engineer on the cheap, and headhunters will just hang up and delete your contact information.

Better not to low-ball an offer or skimp with benefits. 

The world has moved on from outdated visa policies.

Expect more exotic visa targeting immigrants who bring value-added computer skills in topics such as machine learning, software engineering, and fintech.

Many of these Baltic countries bleed huge swaths of youth that migrate to higher-wage countries in Western Europe.

Sadly, they never come back unless visiting relatives, in effect crushing the local birth rate.

The Estonian government has been bold and is, in some ways, acting with a start-up mentality itself.

This young, audacious government looks to scale up as fast as possible. The visionary policy is seen as the solution to maneuvering around long-lasting social problems.

These pro-growth tech policies could invigorate local youth offering them a lifeline in their own country.

Rebranding itself as the digital nomad epicenter is a risky move that most governments wouldn't dare to do.

It's easy to ignore the brain drain in the Baltics while I am based in the Bay Area.

Silicon Valley has been drawing in the Rolls Royce of tech talent for generations.

How can diminutive Estonia engineer tech growth?

They must learn how to crawl before they can walk.

If this visa experiment gains momentum, it could be a game-changer while nudging the Baltics closer into the developed West’s orbit of influence, reinvigorating the local birth rate, and rising income levels.

A win-win situation.

As for me, I won't be taking a $200 flight to Estonia to work in a coffee shop.

I prefer Incline Village, Nevada, and Zermatt, Switzerland, as my favorite digital nomad strongholds.

If it's not broke, don't fix it.

Cloud stocks should be at the vanguard of your tech portfolio, no ifs, ands, or buts.

If you've been living under a rock the past few years, the cloud phenomenon hasn't passed you by and you still have time to cash in.

Microsoft's (MSFT) pivot to its Azure enterprise business has sent its stock skyward, and it is poised to rake in more than $100 billion in cloud revenue over the next 10 years.

Microsoft's share of the cloud market rose from 10% to 15% and is rapidly zeroing in on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Amazon leads the cloud industry it created which is partly why the first-mover advantage is so effective.

It still maintains more than 30% of the cloud market and Microsoft still needs to gain a lot of ground to even come close.

Amazon (AMZN) relies on AWS to underpin the rest of its businesses and that is why AWS contributes the lion’s share of Amazon's total operating income.

Cloud revenue is even starting to account for a noticeable share of Apple's (AAPL) earnings, which has previously bet the ranch on hardware products, most notably the iPhone and iPad.

The future is about the cloud.

These days, the average venture capitalist probably hears about the cloud 100 times a day.

So, before we get deep into the weeds with this letter on cloud services, cloud fundamentals, cloud plays, and cloud Trade Alerts, let's get into the basics of what the cloud actually is.

Think of this as a cloud primer.

It's important to understand the cloud, both its strengths and limitations. Giant companies that have it figured out, such as Salesforce (CRM) and Zscaler (ZS), are some of the fastest-growing companies in the world.

Understand the cloud and you will readily identify its bottlenecks and bulges that can lead to dramatic investment opportunities.

And that's where I come in.

Cloud storage refers to the online space where you can store data. It resides across multiple remote servers housed inside imposing data centers all over the country, some as large as football fields, often in rural areas where land, labor, and electricity are cheap.

They are built using virtualization technology, which means that storage space spans across many different servers and multiple locations. If this sounds crazy, remember that the original Department of Defense packet-switching design was intended to make the system atomic bomb-proof.

As a user, you can access any single server at any one time anywhere in the world. These servers are owned, maintained and operated by giant third-party companies such as Amazon, Microsoft, and Alphabet (GOOGL), which may or may not charge a fee for using them.

The most important features of cloud storage are:

1) It is a service provided by an external provider.

2) All data is stored outside your computer residing inside an in-house network.

3) A simple Internet connection will allow you to access your data at any time from anywhere.

4) Because of all these features, sharing data with others is vastly easier, and you can even collaborate in real-time, making it the perfect force multiplier in our globalized world.

Once you start using the cloud to store a company's data, the benefits are countless.

1. No Maintenance

Many companies, regardless of their size, prefer to store data inside in-house servers and data centers.

However, these require constant 24-hour-a-day maintenance, so the company has to employ a large in-house IT staff to manage them - a costly proposition.

Thanks to cloud storage, businesses can save costs on maintenance since their servers are now the headache of third-party providers.

Instead, they can divert resources on the core aspects of their business where they can increase value without worrying about managing IT staff of prima donnas.

2. Greater Flexibility

Today's employees want to have a better work/life balance and this goal can be best achieved through telecommuting. Increasingly, workers are bending their jobs to fit their lifestyles, and that is certainly the case here at Mad Hedge Fund Trader.

How else can I shoot off a Trade Alert while hanging from the face of a Swiss Alp?

Cloud storage services, such as Google Drive, offer exactly this kind of flexibility for employees while boosting performance.

According to a recent survey, 79% of respondents already work outside of their office some of the time, while another 60% would switch jobs if offered this flexibility.

With data stored online, it's easy for employees to log into a cloud portal, work on the data they need to, and then log off when they're done. This way, a single project can be worked on by a global team, the work handed off from time zone to time zone until it's done.

It also makes them work more efficiently, saving money for penny-pinching entrepreneurs.

3. Better Collaboration and Communication

In today's business environment, it's common practice for employees to collaborate and communicate with co-workers located around the world.

For example, they may have to work on the same client proposal together or provide feedback on training documents. Cloud-based tools from DocuSign, Dropbox, and Google Drive make collaboration and document management a piece of cake.

These products, which all offer free entry-level versions, allow users to access the latest versions of any document, so they can stay on top of real-time changes which can help businesses to better manage workflow regardless of geographical location.

4. Data Protection

Another important reason to move to the cloud is superior data security, especially in the event of a natural disaster. Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on local data centers in New York City, forcing many websites to shut down operations for days.

The cloud simply routes traffic around disaster zones as if, yes, they have just been destroyed by a nuclear attack.

It's best to move data to the cloud to avoid such disruptions.

Even if one area is affected, your operations don't have to capitulate, and data remains accessible no matter what happens. It's a system called deduplication.

5. Lower Overhead

The cloud can slash expenses fast.

By outsourcing data storage to cloud providers, businesses save on capital and maintenance costs, resources that in turn can be used to expand the business. Setting up an in-house data center requires millions, and that's not to mention perpetual maintenance costs.

Creating an in-house data center seems about as contemporary as a buggy whip, a corset, or a Model T.

Automation is taking place at warp speed displacing employees from all walks of life.

According to a recent report, the U.S. financial industry will depose of 200,000 workers in the next decade because of automating efficiencies.

Yes, humans are going the way of the dodo bird and banking will effectively become algorithms working for a handful of executives and engineers.

The x-factor in this equation is the direct capital of $150 billion annually that banks spend on technological development in-house which is higher than any other industry.

Welcome to the world of lower cost, shedding wage bills, and boosting performance rates.

We forget to realize that employee compensation eats up 50% of bank expenses.

The 200,000 job trimmings would result in 10% of the U.S. bank jobs getting axed.

The hyped-up “golden age of banking” should deliver extraordinary savings and premium services to the customer at no extra cost.

Mobile and online banking has delivered functionality that no generation of customers has ever seen.

The most gutted part of banking jobs will naturally occur in the call centers because they are the low-hanging fruit for the automated chatbots.

A few years ago, chatbots were suboptimal, even spewing out arbitrary profanity, but they have slowly crawled up in performance metrics to the point where some customers are unaware they are communicating with an artificial engineered algorithm.

The wholesale integration of automating the back-office staff isn’t the end of it, the front office will experience a 30% drop in numbers sullying the predated ideology that front office staff are irreplaceable heavy hitters.

Front-office staff have already felt the brunt of downsizing with purges carried out in 2018 representing a fifth year of decline.

Front-office traders and brokers are being replaced by software engineers as banks follow the wider trend of every company transitioning into a tech company.

The infusion of artificial intelligence will lower mortgage processing costs by 20% and the accumulation of hordes of data will advance the marketing effort into a smart, hybrid cloud-based and hyper-targeted strategy.

Historically, a strong labor market and low unemployment boost wage growth, but national income allocated to workers has dipped from about 63% in 2000 to 56% in 2018.

Causes stem from the deceleration in union membership and outsourcing has snatched away negotiating power amongst workers and the implemented mass automation has poured fat on the fire.

I was recently in Budapest, Hungary on a business trip and on a main thoroughfare, a J.P. Morgan and Blackrock office stood a stone’s throw away from each other employing an army of local English-proficient Hungarians for 30% of the cost of American bankers.  

Banks simply possess wider optionality to outsource to an emerging nation or to automate hard-to-fill positions now.

In this race to zero, companies can easily rebuff requests for higher salaries and if they threaten to walk off the job, a robot can just pick up the slack.

Automation is getting that good now!

The last two human bank hiring waves are a distant memory.

The most recent spike came in the 7 years after the dot com crash of 2001 until the sub-prime crisis of 2008 adding around half a million jobs on top of the 1.5 million that existed then.

The longest and most dramatic rise in human bankers was from 1935 to 1985, a 50-year boom that delivered over 1.2 million bankers to the U.S. workforce.

This type of human hiring will likely never be seen again in the U.S. financial industry.

Recomposing banks through automation is crucial to surviving as fintech companies are chomping at the bit and even tech companies like Amazon and Apple have started tinkering with new financial products.

And if you thought this phenomenon was limited to the U.S., think again. Europe is by far the biggest culprit by already laying off 63,036 employees in 2019, more than 10x higher the number of U.S. financial job losses.

In a sign of the times, the European outlook has turned demonstrably negative with Deutsche Bank announcing layoffs of 18,000 employees through 2022 as it scales down its investment banking business.

Germany banks are also passing on the burden of negative interest rates to their clients.

A recent survey by Deutsche Bundesbank shows that 58% of banks are charging all savers negative interest rates while others only target wealthy and corporate clients.

If the U.S. dips into negative rates in the future, expect the same nasty effect on job force cuts that Europe has experienced.

Either way, don’t tell your kid to get into banking because they will most likely be feeding on scraps in the future.  

2019 GLOBAL JOB LOSSES IN FINANCE